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Saturday, 3 September 2016

I'LL BE YOUR MIRROR

I cannot comprehend how the Pop Art-ist Andy Warhol ate the
same lunch for twenty years – like Albert Einstein, or Alfred Hitchcock, who
always wore the same clothes, I can only guess a standard lunch of condensed soup
(usually tomato) and Coca-Cola means you save precious seconds that can be
spent thinking how to produce the perfect screen print of Marilyn Monroe, or of
an electric chair, or something.

Having just eaten this lunch before writing – I had cream of
mushroom – I feel that fewer than three hundred calories does not feel like
enough to sustain you until dinner, and the soup really needs to be eaten with
something. It might fill a hole in your stomach, but not much more.

However, this was not why Warhol, whose career as a
commercial illustrator for newspaper and magazine advertisements led him into
fine art, chose to make his name by painting the cans and bottles that he saw
every day. With a chance to submit works to a gallery, and a need for to
distinguish his work from more polished artists, like the comic book-style
canvasses of Roy Lichtenstein, or British artists like Peter Blake (he of the “Sergeant
Pepper” album cover), a friend suggested Warhol should paint a subject already
familiar to people.

The final work, literally named “Campbell’s Soup Cans”
(1962), consisting of thirty-two paintings of every flavour available at the
time, including Manhattan clam chowder, caused a sensation, mostly from people
not sure what to make of it, or outrage over seemingly too much effort used to
paint a picture of such an easily available, manufactured object.

Pop Art is based around taking images from popular culture,
often changing their context and meaning as a result. The more ironic the use
of a banal or kitschy item, the more success the artist may have - the reason a
five-year-old can’t do it is because they wouldn’t know why they should. It was
a journey not many people had taken, or would want to take, but in our era of
unmade beds and sharks in formaldehyde, gallery audiences nowadays are much
more receptive.

While I see the elevation of mass production into fine art,
what I also see how we can rightly take mass production for granted. Without
various factories, processes and conveyor belts, consider how much effort it
would take to produce a can of condensed soup, and a bottle of cola, from
cooking the soup and mixing the drink, through to forming a metal can, blowing
a glass bottle, and illustrating the labels.

In the book “The Philosophy of Andy Warhol,” whether he
wrote it or not, Warhol, an immigrant from what is now Slovakia, stated what made
the United States great was how it “started the tradition where the richest consumers
buy essentially the same things as the poorest… the more equal something is,
the more equal it is.” Whether you spent tens of millions of dollars on his
paintings of soup tins and Coke bottles or, in my case, £1.68, the meaning of
what you see is the same. Democracy, especially in art, means no special
treatment for anyone, and levelling the playing field, however that is done,
means someone had to take a big step first.

Originally intended to be sold off as individual canvasses,
the gallery owner bought all of “Campbell’s Soup Cans,” and they are now kept
together by the Museum of Modern Art in New York. For Andy Warhol, having had
his first successful art show, he could concentrate on pictures of what he enjoyed
the most – soup, Coca-Cola, money and celebrity.